


The Fall

by Aredhel_M



Category: Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 12:58:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17829026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aredhel_M/pseuds/Aredhel_M
Summary: I remember the Fall when stars shot and sky burnt.





	The Fall

I remember the Fall when stars shot and sky burnt.

I remember my mentor’s training, hold your breath, restrain your move, observe——give the enemy a fierce strike as quick as a shooting star. I like the analogy of shooting star, but I was only the Stardust and the stars burn magnificently only when they fall. We would fall, after all, death is the lingering shadow and the final destiny for a soldier. I do not deny.

I feel my body. I feel my heart. Man-made, cold, metallic, technical. Yet I suppose I was actually born in blazing fire, made up of blood and ashes, or at least I was trained to be. Some tags were born with, Mars dwellers, Urm warrior, even though I was designed to kill, it doesn’t mean I ever liked it. Same truth for my body, like Ido, my doctor, my father told me once, neither good nor bad, you have to accept it.

That’s all. Accept it. All in all, your fate is not at the hand of your control. It’s just meaningless to talk about the future when you struggle so hard barely to survive. To make the most of man’s mortal life down on the earth, the best way is to admit there are things and goals beyond your reach. It sounds crucial to quit daydreams, but that’s what wise people do, focusing on the present life, no matter how harsh and ugly reality is.

But it makes no sense to me if I don’t even know who I am, or more importantly, who I was.

Past and memory earn people belongingness, for some people, part of their life feed on the flashback of their memories. And belongingness is extremely vital when you are alone in this hopeless Iron City. With my memory completely blank, I feel like a little grass floating in the air, without roots, without connections, without a home.

Home. The word, the sound, triggers no nostalgia but instead, offers me a strange warmness and belongingness that I had never experienced before. I obeyed him in the very beginning when the concept of home still pleased me. Everyone has the original desire to go against Fathers, I’m not the exception.

It merely because what matters most is to find out my lost identity, to find a way out. It’s so important, I don’t want to die without knowing my name, even if it’s just a military number. I need it, as urgent as a violent fight.

How was I trained before? I couldn’t tell, yet my brain could, so is my body. My mentor, my mother, my spiritual hometown, she trained me to be a soldier, prepared to sacrifice in a battle. Nothing noble about it, nothing glorious, just my fate, just what I was made for.

I accept it.

This is what I was built for, to kill Nova, to destroy Zalem, to embrace the eventual death like all other soldiers. As for the reason, soldiers don’t bring up questions, simply obey the order. That’s what soldiers do. So I listened to the teaching and obeyed the order.

Certainly, I wasn’t the best of them, my mentor got really frustrated with me once or twice but I remember her smile of encouragement or comfort when I finally passed the test.

I still remember the flat, emotionless voice of her: congratulations, you are a soldier now. Your number is ninety-nine.

It was the first time I had a symbol of my own, a military code, ninety-nine.

I have no story to tell. It was a long and painful journey to be a soldier, during which there wasn’t much about love or care. Loneliness and later on, solitude was my only companion. Things would change a little bit when my mentor knocked on my cell door and said, get out and have something to eat.

I was a good soldier, I always obeyed the order.

I reacted quickly as she called, she waited for me at the end of the corridor, standing right under the sunlight. Her golden hair shined in the sun. That was the most and only beautiful thing I knew throughout my whole life. We hardly talked. For most of the time, she reminded me of my defects during the fighting, warned me I could lose my life thousands of times in a real battle.

I did not speak. Simply listened, and replied, yes master, sorry master, won’t be the same next time master.

She would nod, after that, we walked through the long corridor in silence.

Maybe she had a dozen reasons to dine with me every time, only with me, but I knew none of them. Perhaps I was in the necessity of extra training, she never stopped teaching me about her fighting techniques when we were eating.

In the end, she concluded like always, you need to train harder. The war is oncoming.

Now I remember everything about the fighting skills I learnt, consequently, I remember everything about her. My mentor, my mother, my spiritual hometown, I couldn’t even remember her name, if she really had one. But I remembered how her golden hair shined like diamond under the bright sunlight of a summer day.

We never talked about love. And we could never ever talk about it neither.

She held me tight when I was about to fall, with something I couldn’t understand in her eyes.

“Destroy the Zalem.”

She threw me up high to the surface of the tunnel with all her power, I remembered I said something I could not understand three hundred years ago but fully understand by now.

I said, I love you. Just like I said to Hugo before he fell right in front of me.

 

 


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